Mobile review round-up: 'Super Hexagon', 'HueBrix', 'McPixel', more

Each week, Digital Spy rounds up the biggest mobile gaming releases with reviews and trailers. This week brings players a geometric challenge, colorful puzzles, a ridiculous hero and a gravity-defying rabbit.

Super Hexagon

Platforms: iPhone, iPadPrice: 69p / $1

From the creator of VVVVVVV comes the devilishly difficult Super Hexagon. Players rotate a tiny arrow around a hexagon in the center of the screen, attempting to dodge sides of the geometric shape flying toward to the middle from all directions. This core idea is taken to dizzying heights as the entire screen constantly rotates and pulses with the music. The game bluntly and honestly calls its lowest difficulty setting "hard", only getting more challenging from there with two additional settings.

Super Hexagon is perfectly designed for mobile. It isn't uncommon for a round of the game to last only a few seconds, with runs lasting 30 seconds or more feeling like monumental achievements. When players do slip up - and they will frequently - a single tap jumps right back into the game. The quick restart allows the micro-game rounds to turn into lengthy play sessions, driven by the compulsion to top your last run.

HueBrix is a delightful and refreshing mobile puzzle game. Players trace outwards from colored blocks, with the goal of filling all empty space with the colors at their disposal. It sounds simple, but can become deviously clever in a hurry as you struggle to figure out how to best allocate the available space. New elements are frequently introduced to increase the challenge, such as alleys to let colors wrap from one side of the board to the other, or squares that only let you pass through them in one direction.

There are just over 100 puzzles included with HuBrix, spanning a tutorial and the 'easy' and 'medium' difficulty settings. It's a sizable package of enjoyable puzzles already, but even more can be found thanks to an additional 17 level packs through in-app purchases.

The downloadable levels add new puzzles in both the easy and medium difficulties, as well as opening up the challenging 'hard' and 'insane' difficulty levels. Players can also create and share their own custom puzzles, though the feature is limited to sharing with your Game Center friends list. Even without the downloadable level packs, HueBrix brings a fresh face to mobile puzzle games for a head-scratching good time.

Cut from the same cloth as Nintendo's WarioWare series, McPixel gives players rapid-fire point-and-click adventure puzzles to solve. The goal is always the same: find and defuse a bomb in 20 seconds or less. However, the way in which that is accomplished will vary wildly, often with ridiculous solutions. In fact, calling them puzzles may be a misnomer.

Tapping on objects in the scene will cause the redheaded hero to interact with them, though never in the way you would expect. For example, tapping a fire extinguisher and then a fire will cause him to swat at the fire as if he could beat it into submission rather than actually put it out.

The game's nonsensical internal logic and humor is a lot of what makes McPixel so charming. The downside is that failing a puzzle means repeating it until you get it right. This lets you see a wide range of ridiculous gags through experimentation, but it can also get frustrating when you want to move on and are held back by a particularly unclear puzzle. Ultimately though, humor wins the day, making McPixel an easy recommendation for mobile gamers looking for a quick laugh.

Grabbity is a gravity-defying new platformer for iOS devices. Instead of relying on virtual buttons, players control the titular rabbit by tilting their device. Tilt to the left or right, and Grabbity will slide or fall in that direction depending on how far you tilted, even walking on the ceiling of you turn it upside down. Grabbity can't survive falls from too high though, making it a challenge to navigate across the walls and ceiling of each level to reach the exit.

The game is free to download, offering 20 levels from the game's first world. An additional 60 levels are also available through in-app purchases, divided into two downloadable level packs. The downloadable levels are where the game really takes off, introducing new enemies to avoid and increasingly clever gravity-based puzzles to solve.

The whole game is pulled together by wonderfully drawn levels, with the bright colors popping even on the smaller iPhone screen. Mobile gamers looking for charm and challenge will find both in Grabbity.